piracy

Believe it or not, it was and is possible to track the traffic that MegaUpload and the rest of the piracy-laden file-sharing groups out there have compared to the rest of the web. A series of studies have been conducted by a few sources we're checking out today and the results are staggering, depending on how you look at it, with the first giant being the one hour following the January 19th raid of MegaUpload. In that one hour, the entirety of the Internet lost between 2 and 3 precent of its total volume in traffic.

There's been a bit of furor over the most recent of our ever-so-loved legal battles that you'll all love to hear: Motorola has demanded 2.25% of Apple's sales for use of their 3G patent. Have a heart and listen to Don Reisinger as he sees the future in the Microsoft Kinect as the Next Big Thing even though it's been out for quite a while. Meanwhile note how the US government is saying that cyber-crime will soon overtake terrorism as a top threat - you've got their attention now, folks!

The anti-piracy crusade has claimed another victim, with BitTorrent indexing site btjunkie voluntarily shutting down this weekend. Apparently the fifth most popular torrent site online in 2011, btjunkie had opened its doors to download indexing in 2005. "We've been fighting for years for your right to communicate" the team behind the site said in a statement on Sunday, "but it's time to move on."

The Pirate Bay is literally taking digital piracy to the next dimension, and the process has already begun. The online downloading company told users last month that in addition to the requisite slate of movies, music, and TV show content it offered through means of copyright infringement, it wanted to add files that could be used for 3D printers. So in essence, users are now able to swap physical products in addition to digital products, without recognizing the original owner of the content.

One of the most recent leaders to sign the secretive and wide-spread internet censorship-minded Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement has now apologized and called for mass demonstrations to protest what she's done. It's Slovenia's ambassador to Japan, miss Helena Drnovsek Zorko, who signed the ACTA and was immediately drown in emails and calls from Slovenians criticizing her for doing so. This bill was then read in full by the ambassador, she then deciding that the agrees fully with the critics who've mailed her, apologizing to her children and her country before calling for what's effectively a revolt against the agreement on the whole.

MegaUpload founder and CEO Kim Dotcom has again been denied bail by a New Zealand court, after his appeal to the High Court was rejected over fears he might abscond to avoid extradition. The appeals judge agreed with a lower court decision in late January that Dotcom - who has a track record of avoiding arrest, as well as multiple passports and bank accounts - was highly likely to flee the country to Germany, where he would be safe from extradition to the US. Dotcom protested that he wanted to spend time with his pregnant wife, Reuters reports, as well as alleging that he had been mistreated by police during his arrest.

FBI investigators may have infected MegaUpload's computers with spyware so as to monitor Skype and email messaging, it's been suggested, with sources within the Microsoft-owned VoIP company claiming it was not asked to turn over conversation logs. Multiple chat records were included by the FBI within its case against MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom and other employees at the file-sharing site, dating back as much as five years, though exactly how the US government acquired them is unclear. Sources within Skype tell CNET that no approach was made to them to release private logs.

This morning we must cross our hearts and say goodbye to the sinking pirate ship - or its crew, anyway, as the Swedish Supreme Court has rejected the final appeal of the Pirate Bay. On a more positive note, Sony has named Kaz Hirai their new President and CEO. His biggest challenge will be to sell us four screens, so says Chris Davies.

If 3D printing advances as fast as 2D printing advanced, we'll be working with our own Replicators from Star Trek by the year 2080. It took just 40 years for the original printing press to turn over from the single Gutenberg press to get to a mass production scale across Europe, and much, much less time for computers to advance from massive machines to teeny-tiny chips. With advances like home-bound do it yourself printers and the fact that pirate sites across the web are now sharing model files so that you might print your own objects at home without effort, we've not got much time at all before advances are made to the tune of Earl Gray, Hot.

Legitimate user data stored with seized file-sharing service MegaUpload is safe from deletion until at least mid-February, the lawyer for the piracy-accused site has confirmed, though there's still no way for users to actually access it. Having been taken down by US federal prosecutors earlier this month, the longevity of MegaUpload's database was in question after investigators said hosting companies could begin deleting data from Thursday, February 2. That's been avoided, MegaUpload lawyer Ira Rothken told TorrentFreak, for "at least" two weeks more.